"I was really excited to write this article, because it gave me an excuse to really think about what beautiful code is. I still don't think I know, and maybe it's entirely subjective. I do think the two biggest things, for me at least, are stylistic indenting and maximum const-ness. A lot of the stylistic choices are definitely my personal preferences, and I'm sure other programmers will have different opinions. I think the choice of what style to use is up to whoever has to read and write the code, but I certainly think it's something worth thinking about. I would suggest everyone look at the Doom 3 source code because I think it exemplifies beautiful code, as a complete package: from system design down to how to tab space the characters." John Carmack himself replies in the comments.

In fact, I'm sure that, in some places, I've been guilty of writing slightly less than ideal code using things like the ternary operator (PHP, mostly) and list comprehensions (Python) in order to vertically-compact my code.

I personally think list comprehensions are a cool feature and should be used more, not just in Python. It may be harder to figure out what it does, but at a glance, at least you can tell what kind of things are in the list.

I personally think list comprehensions are a cool feature and should be used more, not just in Python. It may be harder to figure out what it does, but at a glance, at least you can tell what kind of things are in the list.

I normally agree wholeheartedly (one of many reasons why I love using CoffeeScript in place of writing Javascript directly), but even they can be abused.

See, for example, this inefficient one-liner I've used as a disposable snippet for doing 90% of the parsing of simple, un-sectioned, unquoted rcfile-like key=value files in reference-counted implementations of Python:

dict([line.strip().split('=') for line in open(whatever) if line.strip() and not line.lstrip().startswith('#')])

(90% because it still needs an extra step to trim whitespace from the key and value names but I don't remember off-hand how to cram that into the same line.)